Many products such as construction panels, beams and garage doors are made from strip material that is pulled from a roll or coil of the strip material and processed using rollforming equipment or machines. A detailed description of a rollforming machine may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,434,994, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. A rollforming machine typically removes strip material (e.g., a metal) from a coiled quantity of the strip material and progressively bends and forms the strip material to produce a product profile and, ultimately, a finished product.
Uncoiled rolled metal or strip material may have certain undesirable characteristics such as, for example, coil set, crossbow, buckling along one or both outer edges, mid-edges or a center portion, etc. As a result, the strip material removed from a coil typically requires conditioning (e.g., flattening and/or leveling) prior to subsequent processing in a rollforming machine. Typically, the strip material is conditioned by flattener or a leveler to have a substantially flat condition. However, in some applications it may be desirable to condition the strip material to have a non-flat condition. For example, the strip material may be conditioned to have a particular bowed condition to facilitate a subsequent rollforming process in which the conditioned strip material may be cut, bent, punched, etc. to produce a finished product.
Strip material removed from coils is often conditioned (e.g., flattened) using a leveler, which is a well known type of apparatus. A leveler typically includes a plurality of work rolls. Some of the work rolls are adjustable to enable the stresses applied by the work rolls to the strip material being processed to be varied across the width of the strip material. In this manner, one or more selected longitudinal regions or zones (e.g., outer edges, mid-edges, a center portion, etc.) of the strip material can be permanently stretched to achieve a desired finished material condition (e.g., flatness).
To achieve a desired material condition, the settings of the adjustable work rolls are usually initially selected based on the type and thickness of the material to be conditioned. For example, a control unit coupled to the leveler may enable an operator to enter the material type and thickness. Based on the material type and thickness information entered by the operator, the control unit may retrieve appropriate default work roll settings. The operator may then vary the default work roll settings prior to conditioning the material and/or during the conditioning process to achieve a desired finished material condition. For example, an operator at an inspection point near the output of the leveler may visually detect an undesirable material condition such as a crossbow condition, a coil set condition, a buckle or wave along one or both of the outer edges, mid-edges, the center, or any other longitudinal region or zone of the strip material being processed, etc. Unfortunately, manually configuring or adjusting a leveler in this manner to condition strip material to achieve a desired condition can be a time consuming and error prone process, particularly due to the high degree of human expertise and involvement required.
Using a leveler to process strip material may additionally or alternatively involve a certification process. For example, quantities of cut sheets of the strip material processed by a leveler may be bundled for shipment. A plurality of sheets may be sampled from each bundle and the sampled sheets may be visually inspected and manually measured by an operator. The visual inspection and quantitative measurements may be used to generate, for example, flatness information for the sampled sheets. In turn, the flatness information for the sampled sheets selected from each bundle may be used as statistical information for purposes of certifying the bundles from which the sheets were selected. However, as is the case with known leveler adjustment apparatus and methods, known certification processes are very time consuming and prone to error due to the high degree of human expertise and involvement required.